Otto Schnering, a Chicago confectioner and a name picked by contest.

Butterfinger began in Chicago in the 1920s, in the same company that made Baby Ruth. English Wikipedia says the bar was created in 1923 by Otto Schnering of the Curtiss Candy Company, which Schnering had founded near Chicago, Illinois, in 1922. Wikipedia says the name was chosen through a public contest held by the company, and it describes the product as a layered, crisp peanut-butter core under a coating that, because it contains no cocoa butter, is not eligible to be described as chocolate.

The bar stayed with Curtiss for four decades. Wikipedia’s ownership list gives the Curtiss Candy Company as the owner from 1923 to 1964, and then traces the brand through a series of American food groups: Standard Brands from 1964, Nabisco from 1981, RJR Nabisco from 1985 and the investment firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., which bought RJR Nabisco in December 1988.

Wikipedia, citing The Economist, says that in February 1990 the Swiss food company Nestlé bought Baby Ruth and Butterfinger from RJR Nabisco. For the next 28 years the bar was a Nestlé brand, sold in the United States alongside the rest of Nestlé USA’s confectionery and, Wikipedia says, also made internationally by Nestlé. Its Nestlé-era products included, according to Wikipedia, a Butterfinger Ice Cream Bar introduced in 1991, the marble-sized BB’s sold in bags from 1992 until 2006, Mini Bites in 2009 and Butterfinger Peanut Butter Cups in 2014.

Nestlé, then Ferrero and Ferrara.

The brand changed hands again in 2018. Wikipedia, citing a CNN report of 16 January 2018, says Nestlé announced in January 2018 that it would sell more than twenty of its US confectionery brands, Butterfinger among them, to the Italian confectionery group Ferrero. Citing a Business Wire release of 31 March 2018, Wikipedia says the deal was completed in March 2018 and the brands were folded into Ferrero’s American candy operations. Wikipedia says the Butterfinger Peanut Butter Cups and a dark-chocolate version of the bar were discontinued when the bars passed to Ferrero.

Wikipedia’s infobox names the Ferrara Candy Company as owner in the United States since 2018 and the Ferrero Group as the parent, and its lead describes Butterfinger as a bar manufactured by US-based Ferrara, a subsidiary of Ferrero. Ferrero has owned Butterfinger since 2018.

Under Ferrero the bar itself was reworked. Wikipedia, citing Business Insider in February 2019, says Ferrero reformulated Butterfinger in January 2019, with labels reading “Improved Recipe” and advertising that called it the “Better” Butterfinger. According to the same account, the core of the new bar uses runner peanuts roasted at the manufacturing plant, and the packaging was also upgraded.

Design and documentation.

The candies in this group are American sweets whose identity lives on the outside of the pack. A candy brand’s look is carried by small, cheap and much-handled things: a twist wrapper in a single strong colour, a paper roll of identical pieces, a narrow cardboard box sized for a cinema counter, or a bar wrapper read in a second at a checkout.

Wrapper colour often signals a flavour before any words are read, and a roll pack or theatre box can become as recognisable as the name printed on it. Some wrappers carry more than a name, with jokes, riddles or slogans printed where a label would usually sit, so the packaging becomes part of the product.

Many American candy names have also outlived the companies that created them, passing between owners over the decades while keeping their names and packs. Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who started the candy, who owns it now, where it is made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Bart Simpson, a slogan and a hundredth-birthday wrapper.

Butterfinger’s advertising is tied to an animated family. Wikipedia says that in 1988 the brand began advertising with The Simpsons, which at the time was still a series of shorts on The Tracey Ullman Show, and that the first commercial, “The Butterfinger Group”, featured the debut of the character Milhouse Van Houten. From 1992, Wikipedia says, the Simpsons also appeared in commercials for Butterfinger BB’s. The pairing was phased out by 2001 and brought back in 2010; in February 2010, Wikipedia says, the brand revived its slogan as “Nobody’s gonna lay a finger on my Butterfinger”, and in April 2013 the official Simpsons Twitter account announced that the campaign featuring Bart Simpson would return. Writing in Bleeding Cool in 2024, Gavin Sheehan said that before the Simpsons era the bar’s last memorable campaign had been in the 1950s, with an animated elephant.

The brand has also played with its own name. Wikipedia says that on 1 April 2008 Nestlé ran an April Fool’s Day prank claiming it had renamed the bar “The Finger”, citing consumer research that the original name was “clumsy” and “awkward”, complete with a fake website and a video press release; when the joke was revealed, the website redirected visitors to a fictitious Butterfinger Comedy Network. Wikipedia also lists campaigns built around a countdown to the end of the world called BARmageddon, a crop circle in Kansas and a comedy-horror film titled “Butterfinger the 13th”.

The wrapper itself became the medium for the centenary. Bleeding Cool reported on 13 May 2024 that Ferrero had unveiled a campaign for the bar’s 100th anniversary with The Simpsons: festive birthday wrappers featuring characters from the series, sold for a limited time in a regular size, a two-piece share pack and a fun-size laydown bag, together with a Butterfinger Birthday Sweepstakes. Wikipedia says Bart and Homer appeared on the single and two-pack wrappers, while the whole family was on the Fun Size packaging. In the 2017 episode “Treehouse of Horror XXVIII”, Wikipedia adds, the family itself appeared as candy in a bowl, with Bart as a “Barterfinger” bar.

For a design guide, Butterfinger shows how a candy bar can borrow a cartoon character so thoroughly that the character’s catchphrase becomes the brand’s slogan and, a century on, its anniversary wrapper. Compare it with Baby Ruth, its Curtiss Candy Company sibling, and Nerds, another Ferrara brand. For this guide we use wrapper blue and deep navy with crisp gold on peanut cream and a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Butterfinger’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.